“Goodly Lord, what a wit-snapper are you!” (Merchant of Venice, III.v.45)

Sarah Palin is a… WHAT??

“Civil rights icon” Rep. John Lewis made news recently by drawing a parallel between John McCain and segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace. Sen. McCain was understandably gobsmacked, and Lewis subsequently (and unconvincingly) backtracked in the face of anti-race-baiting backlash, but Lewis’s point was that the tone of McCain’s and Sarah Palin’s recent campaign rhetoric was “sowing the seeds of hatred and division,” and that McCain and Palin were “playing with fire” and “playing a dangerous game.”

Want to see a “dangerous game” played with “hatred and division?” Check below the break.

Keep in mind that Lewis wasn’t pointing to anything that McCain or Palin said themselves…he was saying that what they said was encouraging others, out in the audience, to say manifestly nasty things about Barack Obama (or to bomb black churches…Lewis isn’t quite clear):

George Wallace never threw a bomb.He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights.Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.

This post from Gateway Pundit (Warning:very objectionable language in photos at link) has coverage of people protesting Sarah Palin’s appearance in Philadelphia that will surely warm the cockles of Rep. Lewis’s heart. The uniform in vogue features black t-shirts bearing giant, neon-green captions saying “Sarah Palin is a C***” on the front.

I’m sorry, but where I grew up, calling somebody that was about as bad as it got…if you were caught using that word, you were in for a world of hurt from a wide array of fronts. If John Lewis is going to hold McCain and Palin responsible for isolated cranks in crowds of thousands at their rallies, will he say nothing about this? When people start showing up at Obama or Biden appearances wearing “Barack Obama is a N*****” t-shirts, then I’ll start paying even the slightest attention to what Rep. Lewis has to say about sowing seeds of hatred. Until then, I’ll just advise him to look to his own house first, and leave it at that.

He can also stand to check the Obama supporter highlights compiled here…unbelievable. Do these count as fruits of the “seeds of hatred?”

Radio host and former NOW official Tammy Bruce comments on the anti-Palin shirts on CNN (via Hot Air).